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Literary Criticism General

Imagining Religious Toleration

A Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830

edited by Alison Conway & David Alvarez

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Jul 2019
Category
General, General, History
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487513979
    Publish Date
    Jul 2019
    List Price
    $85.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487501792
    Publish Date
    Aug 2019
    List Price
    $85.00

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Description

Formerly a site of study reserved for intellectual historians and political philosophers, scholarship on religious toleration, from the perspective of literary scholars, is fairly limited. Largely ignored and understudied techniques employed by writers to influence cultural understandings of tolerance are rich for exploration. In investigating texts ranging from early modern to Romantic, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance.

 

Beginning with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms "toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the specific contributions that literature and literary modes have made to cultural history, studying the literary techniques that philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame the questions central to the idea and practice of religious toleration. Tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of authors, the contributors delve into topics such as conversion as an instrument of power in Shakespeare; the relationship between religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire; and the ways in which writing can act as a call for tolerance.

About the authors

Alison Conway (KELOWNA, BC) is Associate Dean of Research, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750.

Alison Conway's profile page

David Alvarez is an associate professor and chair of the English Department at Depauw University.

David Alvarez's profile page